Being There: The Virtual Eyewitness
At the turn of this century, I started noticing a torrent of messages from Iranian strangers each time I logged into my Yahoo! Messenger account. I was a courts reporter in San Diego and thought the dozens of daily chat requests were coming from up north in Los Angeles, where the largest concentration of Iranians live outside their homeland. But an adjective in one message struck me. “Take a look at my photo,” one guy implored, after several unsuccessful attempts at getting my attention. “I’m really quite ghashangh.” Ghashangh? The word, meaning pretty in Farsi, was something my grandmother in Tehran might use to describe a young boy. What macho Iranian-American would refer to himself that way?
I wrote back. “Are you in Tehran?” I asked on a hunch.
“Yes,” he said, “aren’t you?”
As it turned out, just about all the messages were streaming in from Iran–and not just Tehran. All were male, most of them very young, in their late teens or early twenties, looking for a date. They didn’t believe I was in the United States and well outside their demographics. Those circumstances made it difficult to have a proper conversation, or ask the kind of questions I wanted as a reporter, but it gave me a fascinating look inside the country.
That digital opening offered me a view into Iran that was more enlightening than any journalism coming out of the country at the time. Five years later, by the time I left for had started migrating from Yahoo! to Gmail. Now I noticed messages coming from the elite–university students and faculty, even an increasing number from within the cadre of the ruling establishment.
In fact, checking emails one day, I thought it peculiar that two of the bright green circles that lit up on my Gmail instant chat belonged to officials: a relatively high-ranking American and an Iranian one. Though universes apart in distance and ideology, they were next to each other, live in my email account, and easily within my grasp. I began to think of how I, as a journalist, could connect those virtual dots. The result was Tehran Bureau, the blog I launched from my parents’ living room in Massachusetts in 2008.
The blog’s name found its genesis in a conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker. Remnick attributed a dearth of in-depth reporting on Iran to a lack of any news organization with “a real bureau there.” Tehran Bureau was a response to shrinking foreign news coverage in the United States. It defied tradition. I was not actually in Iran, but thanks to digital reporting tools the blog could tackle media stereotypes and fill in some of the gaps left by newspapers’ scaling back overseas staffs.
As it turned out, the virtual bureau became the new frontline. In a very short time, Tehran Bureau went from occupying a small perch on blogspot.com to a partnership with PBS Frontline. It now reaches a larger audience at The Guardian, where Tehran Bureau is hosted on the newspaper’s popular website and featured occasionally in print. At its Guardian home, a typical Tehran Bureau post gets anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 hits, though some stories–like a recent piece about modeling–drew ten times as much traffic.
During this growth process, Tehran Bureau went through another, subtler, but significant change. We went from being thousands of miles away from the story to being there– literally. In time, we transitioned from doing all of our reporting from a U.S. post to growing a huge pool of reporters, editors, and fact-checkers inside the country. It happened organically, in part because “the old frame for thinking of ‘natives’ who are staying back home and ‘natives’ who have left home doesn’t quite work anymore,” said Iraj Omidvar, an Iranian-American professor who teaches English, technical communication, and media in Atlanta. Thanks to digital technology, “Iranians in Iran and abroad are tied in unprecedented ways that are dramatically changing a wide range of cultural phenomena.” Not the least of which is journalism.